TheChallenge of the Brightest

Today, the Washington Post is reporting that graduate schools have their own drop out problem.

U.S. high schools and doctoral programs share a problem: How do they keep their students enrolled long enough to get a degree?

According to the Council of Graduate Schools, doctoral students drop out at an average rate of 50 to 60 percent -- the same rate reported in some urban K-12 systems. (There are about 400,000 students enrolled in doctoral programs.) In some of the humanities, the completion rate is even lower.

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At stake, some educators say, is America's tradition of world dominance in doctoral education, which has fueled research and innovation since the first PhDs were awarded in the United States in the 1880s.

Similar warnings have been made before, and some educators shrug off the latest ones. But Debra W. Stewart, council president and former university dean, said the need for a solution has never been so pressing.

With China, India and the European Union investing heavily in graduate education programs -- modeled after the U.S. system -- and with international applications down during this decade, Stewart said it is vital to keep U.S. students in the doctoral pipeline.

In truth, this is something that is not all that surprising. From very early on in our children's educational career, we simply fail to challenge our brightest students enough. Let's face it, American public schools fail three sets of students--the special needs children--those with learning or developmental disabilities, the poor/minority students--those on the lower rungs of the socio-economic ladder, and the truly intellectually gifted. Our schools are havens of mediocrity.

While all students should be tended to by the schools, the effort of most of education thought is on the first two groups of students--the special needs and the poor. But if the United States is to compete with the growing influence of Asian and Eurpean intellectual and scientific elite, we must do more to challenge our brightest children, for it is they and the dedicated few who will seek advanced degrees, PhDs and such. The American K-12 school system does little challenge the brightests students. I don't know how many times I have met or talked to students in advanced classes in high school who say they hardly ever study, yet continue to make high grades--only to have their reality destroyed when they reach college and continue on such a high difficulty path. Discouraged, these students muddle through college, get the Bachelor's (because of scholarship or parental payments) and never return.

Yet, I can't help but feel that if the students had been challenged from as early as elementary school, pushed to try harder and harder things, and taught that failure is just as much a great teacher as successes, then we might not be facing the challenges we have in graduate school completion. Of course, a pipeline of gifted students is only part of the graduate school problem--there are economic considerations (i.e. many Ph.D programs are expensive and when a gifted engineer can make solid six figures, why lose money by not working and pay for a Ph.D. program at teh same time), and prestige issues. Simply put, we as a nation do not treat our Ph.D. holders with the same respect as other nations.

The challenge schools systems and colleges face for the education of our brightest students is real. The fact that Ph.D. programs suffer a massive drop our rate is not surprising, but the root cause extends much farther back that undergraduate degrees.